BlackBerry Business Cloud Services: The truth behind the story from one who knows

There is a lot of talk going around about BlackBerry Business Cloud Services on various blogs: Paul Farris’ BlogVolker Weber’s blog
First, let me say, unless you work(ed) for Microsoft or RIM, this is totally irrelevant and transparent. BlackBerry support has been available with Office365 for years. The big deal here is that RIM finally finished their cloud solution which was code-named “Contrail”. This has been long in the making. It’s not insider news, it’s just that few people noticed it when n4bb.com published it back in March 2011.

All it means is that instead of those BES servers sitting in Microsoft’s data centers, they will be sitting in RIM’s data centers. So what’s the big deal? It’s all in the cloud, so you don’t care where the servers sit. What’s more, this doesn’t really apply to all of Office365, only the standard edition for smaller customers. The bigger customers are hosted in dedicated environments and they won’t be moving their BES services for awhile. But it doesn’t matter. You won’t notice any difference and the transition is completely invisible to the customer, save that as it is RIM’s product, they will probably be more responsive to upgrades to the latest version and more savvy in troubleshooting issues. This is really more a positive press opportunity than anything for a company overdue for some good news.

If there were anything even mildly interesting in this story it would be that Domino isn’t mentioned. But I expect that’s just around the corner and they probably don’t want to confuse the message. If your company uses Exchange, you don’t care about Domino. (By the way, LotusLive AKA Smart Cloud also supports BES deployments) This will also give RIM a second press release of glory when they make a similar announcement for Domino.